numerous fighting stories are not, of the genuine nature of the man.  His chief trait all his life long was honesty of all kinds and in all things; not only commonplace, material honesty in dealings, but honesty in language, in purpose, in thought; honesty of mind, so that he could never even practice the most tempting of all deceits, a deceit against himself.  This pervasive honesty was the trait of his identity, which stayed with him from beginning to end, when other traits seemed to be changing, appearing or disappearing, and bewildering the observer of his career.  All the while the universal honesty was there.

It took less than a year for Offut’s shop to come to ruin, for the proprietor to wander off into the unknown void from which he had come, and for Lincoln to find himself again without occupation.  He won some local reputation by navigating the steamboat Talisman up the Sangamon River to Springfield; but nothing came of it.

The foregoing narrative ought to have given some idea of the moral and physical surroundings of Lincoln’s early days.  Americans need to carry their memories hardly fifty years back, in order to have a lively conception of that peculiar body of men which for many years was pushed out in front of civilization in the West.  Waifs and strays from highly civilized communities, these wanderers had not civilization to learn, but rather they had shuffled off much that belonged to civilization, and afterwards they had to acquire it afresh.  Among them crudity in thought and uncouthness in habits were intertwined in odd, incongruous crossings with the remnants of the more respectable customs with which they had once been familiar.  Much they forgot and much they put away as being no longer useful; many of them—­not all—­became very ignorant without being stupid, very brutal without being barbarous.  Finding life hard, they helped each other with a general kindliness which is impracticable among the complexities of elaborate social organizations.  Those who were born on the land, among whom Lincoln belonged, were peculiar in having no reminiscences, no antecedent ideas derived from their own past, whereby to modify the influences of the immediate present.  What they should think about men and things they gathered from what they saw and heard around them.  Even the modification to be got from reading was of the slightest, for very little reading was possible, even if desired.  An important trait of these Western communities was the closeness of personal intercourse in them, and the utter lack of any kind of barriers establishing strata of society.  Individuals might differ ever so widely; but the wisest and the dullest, the most worthless and the most enterprising, had to rub shoulder to shoulder in daily life.  Yet the variety was considerable:  hardy and danger-loving pioneers fulfilling the requirements of romance; shiftless vagrants curiously combining utter inefficiency with a sort of bastard contempt for hardship; ruffians